Researchers warned of a “troubling” accumulation of microplastics in sea ice floating in the Arctic ocean, a major potential source of water pollution as global warming melts the sheets of frozen water.
A team from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) found 17 different plastic types in ice samples gathered during three Arctic expeditions on board the research icebreaker Polarstern in 2014 and 2015.
The discovery suggests microplastics “are now ubiquitous within the surface waters of the world’s ocean,” sea ice physicist Jeremy Wilkinson of the British Antarctic Survey said in a comment on the study.
Of particular concern was the particles’ small size. Some were only 11 micrometres across — about a sixth the diameter of a human hair, the team said. This “means they could easily be ingested by Arctic micro-organisms such as small crustaceans on which fish feed,” said study coauthor Ilka Peeken, an AWI biologist.
According to environmental group World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 8.8 million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans every year, the equivalent of a garbage truck dumping a full load every minute.
On current trends, warns the United Nations (UN), there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.
“The melting of multi-year sea ice exacerbated by climate change could reasonably lead to the release into the water column of large amounts of plastics stored in the Arctic sea ice cover,” Newcastle University oceanographer Miguel Angel Morales Maqueda said in another comment.
What happens to it then, is unclear — do the particles remain in the Arctic, are they transported to waters further south, or do they sink?
Other studies have recently warned that humans are ingesting microplastics in shellfish, tap water and bottled water.
The health risks remain unclear.
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Source: Agence France Presse, 26 April 2018